126 THE NOVELISTS. [1784-1820. The "Zeluco" and other novels of Dr. Moore were of the same semi-didactic character. Fanny Burney was a delineator of fashionable life; but there is nothing half so real in "Evelina" and "Cecilia" and "Camilla," as her pictures of the dull court of George III. at Windsor, with the equerries standing for two hours in an outer room to hear the evening concerts. The ordinary routine of the upper slaves of Royalty, described by one of the victims as "riding and walking, and standing and bowing" in dutiful attendance, and their highest accomplishments, to walk out of a room backwards and never to cough or sneeze-these courtly attributes are eminently sugges tive of the contrast between the life in the Lodge at Windsor in 1786, and the life in the Pavilion at Brighton thirty years later. George III. asking wise questions of men of science that were admitted to the Queen's teatable-Dr. Herschel, Mr. Bryant, and Mr. De Luc;-and the Regent assuring Mr. Wilberforce that if he would come to dine with him his ears should not be offended-"I should hear nothing in his house to give me pain, that even if there should be at another time, there should not be when I was there:"* George III. reading his despatches before his eight o'clock chapel; tramping over his farm or following his harriers till his one o'clock dinner,― and George IV. remaining in his robe de chambre all the morning, either to receive his ministers, or lecturing his tailor on the cut of his last new coat,t-although these may be traits of individual character, they are nevertheless to be associated with marked changes in the general tone of society. The "plain living" was gone. The "high thinking" might have also been "no more," had not a change come over the manners of the great, and had not the middle classes been raised and refined by a nobler order of literature. It was in 1802 that the despairing poet complained, "No grandeur now in nature or in book The age of epics was past; but the charms of poetical or prose narrative were to impart higher pleasures than those of luxurious indulgence to a new race of readers. Looking back upon the real dangers, the vain fears, the party distractions, of the beginning of the century, it was a substantial blessing to the boy growing into manhood that such rich stores of pleasurable emotion were spread before him by the imaginative writers who were then developing their riches. The young student of that time might say, "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold;" but never with such joyous feelings as in these days of new poets and new novelists that may aspire to rank with the immortals. It is difficult to convey to a reader of a later time an adequate notion of the interest excited by the rapid appearance of that series of novels, of which "Waverley was the first that surprised the world into a new source of delight. Scott has attributed his desire to introduce the natives of his own country to the sister kingdom, as having been partly suggested by the well. merited fame of Miss Edgeworth, whose Irish pictures had made the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours. "Life of Wilberforce," vol. iv. p. 277. 1784-1820.] THE WAVERLEY NOVELS-THE EDINBURGH REVIEW. 127 Admirable in their truth as are those novels of Miss Edgeworth, in which she delineates the virtues and the foibles of the Irish of her day; skilful as she was in the management of some of her stories; always using her powers in the cause of an honest patriotism, and in the exposure of social abuses-they had the attraction of faithful representations of existing manners, but wanted that charm of romantic indistinctness which belongs to novels founded upon "chronicles of eld." They have now an historical value which the contemporaries of the accomplished authoress would have scarcely acknowledged. But the author of " Waverley," who lived essentially in the past, although professing to have derived his impulse to paint the Scottish character from "the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact" of Miss Edgeworth, never attempted the picture of the Scot of his own day. "The ancient traditions and high spirit of a people who, living in a civilized age and country, retained so strong a tincture of manners belonging to an early period of society," were suited to a new form of romance in which the picturesque and the literal might be happily blended. How great was the ultimate success of this experiment it is needless to trace; or how Scott's original scheme expanded into tales of "fierce wars and faithful loves," common to various climes and eras of chivalry and feudalism. The success of the Waverley novels made the greater portion of the literature of the Circulating Library a drug in the market. The Inchbalds, and Burneys, and Radcliffes held their places for a little while. But the accumulations of stupidity which had encumbered the booksellers' shelves for thirty years ceased to circulate. Amidst this revolution arose a female writer of real genius, Jane Austen. Her six novels will never be swept away with the rubbish of her "Minerva Press" compeers. The English life of the upper middle classes in the village and the country town-a life unchequered by startling incident; a simple reality which, it might be thought, every one could paint, and which would be dull and uninteresting when painted-is by this young woman delineated with a power which makes actual things more real than what is palpable to all, and by which the most familiar scenes are looked upon as if they were new. This is high Art. The rapid development in the first two decades of this century of a popular literature of a nobler order than what had preceded it, is in some degree to be ascribed to the influence upon opinion of a higher school of criticism. "The Edinburgh Review," in 1802, divorced the crafts of the reviewer and the bookseller. Without wholly assenting to the dictum of lord Cockburn, that Francis Jeffrey was "the greatest of British critics," we may well believe that no one had preceded him, and that few have come after him, who directed the judgment of his contemporaries upon current Literature with such a fund of good sense, with such a quick perception of faults, with such a generous appreciation of beauties, and with such an honest impartiality, always excepting the few cases in which poets, especially, had the misfortune to deviate into fields which the critic deemed barren. The services which that Review rendered to the progress of improvement, in the discussion of the great political and social questions in which improvement at one time looked hopeless, need not here be detailed. It is sufficient for us to say, that it stimulated a healthful spirit of inquiry, and altogether contributed largely to raise the standard of public intelligence. The "Quarterly Review came in 1809 to supply what was deemed a necessary antidote to 128 BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE-ESSAYISTS. [1784-1820. the political opinions of the "Edinburgh." Its editor, William Gifford, was far less tolerant as a critic than Jeffrey, and he had altogether more of partizanship in his estimate of literary merit. But if he was often stern, and sometimes unjust to those of opposite opinions, he was not a tool in the hands of the party leaders with whom he agreed. If Brougham, and Sydney Smith, and Francis Horner, and Mackintosh, were associated with Jeffrey, Gifford could marshal Canning, and Southey, and Scott, and Croker, in the rival ranks. The partizans who wore the drab livery were not a whit less dangerous than the smarter champions of the yellow and blue. Each of the visored knights affected not to know the leaders whom they encountered in the mêlée. Jeffrey never mentioned Gifford, nor Gifford Jeffrey. multitude shouted, and ranged themselves under the rival banners. forty years of contest there was very little left to fight about. It is amusing to look back upon this warfare. It is consolatory to know that through the very fierceness of the battle the cause of truth and justice was advanced. It was felt that, after all, the practical ends of life are best secured by a compromise of extreme opinions. In the arbitrement of posterity upon literary merit, we come to know how powerless are the rash or prejudiced decisions of the highest courts of criticism. Keats was not "snuffed out by an article; " Wordsworth was not doomed to oblivion by "This will never do." The After Following in the wake of the great reviews, there came, in due course, a higher order of Magazines. "Blackwood," about the close of the Regency, acquired an influence that extended far beyond Scotland. There was so much fun in its malice that its violent politics scarcely impeded its universal welcome, at least in England. There was so much of the outpouring of genius in Christopher North, that few cared to inquire whether that fancy and pathos, that exquisite perception of the grand and beautiful in nature, were in unison with the narrow hatreds that belonged to an Edinburgh clique. The very excess of John Wilson's partizanship looks as if ever and anon he worked up his generous nature to uncongenial wrath, and then put on his Sporting Jacket and sallied forth to breathe the pure air of the Moors, in a spirit of peace with all mankind. In raising the whole tone of periodical literature he gave the world a series of prose writings that fully manifested how truly he was a poet. Out of the new race of monthly Miscellanies issued other prose writers who made their mark upon their own time, and will long continue to have a niche in fame's temple. Amongst the foremost are Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Thomas de Quincey. The least voluminous of modern Essayists, Lamb, is the most original. His quaint turns of humour and pathos will command admiration, when the wearisome platitudes of many a great moralist are forgotten. He looked upon society with a deep sympathy and a comprehensive charity. The man who wrote to a friend, "I often shed tears in the motley Strand, for feeling of joy at so much life," could not speak of human sorrows and infirmities with indifference. He had as acute a sense of what is hateful or ridiculous as the keenest of satirists, but he seeks not to extirpate evil by abuse, or to shame folly by sarcasm. Of a very different order of mind was Hazlitt. The quantity which he wrote sufficiently indicates the fertility of his genius; and in many of his critical essays we feel the shrewdness of his judgment and the correctness of his taste. But as he counted amongst his merits that of being 1784-1820.] ESSAYISTS-POLITICAL ECONOMISTS. 129 a good hater, we must not expect to find a just and impartial estimate of contemporaneous persons or things in his political or historical writings. He has the merit of being amongst the first to regard Shakspere from a higher point of view than the race of commentators, too often carping and truculent. But the Stephenses and Malones, nevertheless, kept alive a wholesome spirit of inquiry as to the real meaning of the greatest in all literature, when he uses words and phrases which appear nonsensical or obscure to the ordinary reader. Hazlitt approached Shakspere with the same reverential spirit in which Coleridge laboured with a higher faculty of philosophical criticism. Leigh Hunt, of this trio of Essayists who often worked in companionship, will probably continue to have the larger number of admirers. He walked in the pleasantest places of literature. To him the great imaginative writersespecially those of Italy, and of our early school upon which Italian poetry impressed its character-offer. a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets." In his youthful career he endured a harder fate than most of those who were opposed to the ruling powers; but he carried "the sunshine of the breast" into his prison, and the same unfailing spirits bore him through many of the disappointments of his after life. The same qualities that made the charm of his conversation pervade all his writings. The greatest of the thinkers who was cradled in the Magazine Literature, De Quincey, belongs more properly to the next period; although his "Opium Eater" was produced in the "London Magazine" of 1821. The "Essays" of John Foster, a Baptist minister, which first appeared in 1805, constituted one of the most treasured volumes of a period in which there were fewer books than at the present time, and when good sense, extensive knowledge, and liberal aspirations could secure a warm welcome for miscellaneous works, although not belonging to the class of light literature. These Essays will not readily be neglected even in an age which seeks the excitement of less natural writing. The school of Political Economists that succeeded Adam Smith-Malthus, James Mill, and Ricardo-had important influences on the political action of their time. So also had the great philosophical jurist, Jeremy Bentham. We shall have to recur to these names at another period. Of a different school was a political economist who took a broader view of the relations of Capital and Labour than these scientific writers, who had principally regard to the production of wealth. Dr. Thomas Chalmers, in his "Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns," advocated the belief that the wants of the poor might be provided for without the machinery of the English Poor Laws. In his own locality of Glasgow he organized a system which was successful in making private benevolence prevent the necessity of a public recognition of pauperism. He was convinced that religion presented the only cure for the evils of society. The eloquence with which he enforced this doctrine, and the sound judgment which he applies to the great questions of what is now called "social science," have had a more permanent influence than his views of the Poor Law System. The history of the progress of Scientific Discovery is too large a subject, and requires too many technical details, to permit a notice here beyond an enumeration of the principal discoverers. Sir William Herschel was still pursuing his observations at the age of eighty, when the first encourager of his astronomical pursuits, George III., died. He discovered the planet VOL. VIII. K 130 SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. [1784-1820. Uranus in 1781. It has been said of him, that " no one individual ever added so much to the facts on which our knowledge of the solar system is founded." His great telescope of forty feet focal length was completed by him at Slough, on the 28th of August, 1789, on which day he discovered with it the sixth satellite of Saturn. The principle of the reflecting telescopes of Herschel was an improvement upon those of earlier construction. Herschell's Great Telescope at Slough. The discoveries in Chemistry, and their applications to the Arts, in the earlier portion of the reign of George III. were principally derived from the experiments of Black, Cavendish, and Priestley. To these philosophers at the beginning of the present century, succeeded the most original of inquirers and the most popular of teachers, Sir Humphrey Davy. His Lectures at the Royal Institution diffused a love of science amongst the general community. His invention of the Safety Lamp, in 1815, showed how the profoundest investigations might result in an apparently simple contrivance of the highest utility, like most of the great inventions that have changed the face of the world. Dalton in 1808 produced his Atomic Theory. Wollaston followed Dalton in a course of similar research, and in other walks made his experiments the bases of large additions to the Industrial Arts. But of all those who by Science diminished the amount of domestic sorrow, and enlarged the average term of human life, was the physician who for half a century had been striving in vain to make the medical world feel confidence. in his discovery of Vaccination. For thirty years after this antidote to the small-pox was first practised in 1800, the wholly ignorant and imperfectly educated still stood in the way of the general diffusion of this great blessing * "English Cyclopedia." |